Recently announced for the DS8870 , the high-performance flash enclosur e (HPFE) is a RAID storage enclosure that can support up to thirty 400 GB encryption capable flash cards (1.8-inch, 46 mm form factor) in a 1U rack space. It is installed in the DS8870 base frame. The high-performance flash enclosure comes with various capabilities and performance characteristics, as summarized here: The high-performance flash enclosure delivers up to 250,000 IOPS and up to 3.4 GBps bandwidth in just one EIA (1U) of rack... [More]

What's new? The sixth generation of IBM Easy Tier, provides support for the flash cards in the new High-performance flash enclosure, announced for the DS8870 with microcode Release 7.3 (General Availability scheduled for June 6, 2014) . The use of flash cards and the flash storage enclosure in the DS8870 provides up to three and a half times the performance of current flash drives (SSDs). All previously announced IBM Easy Tier functions apply to the new flash cards, including manual volume... [More]

For several years already the DS8000 series has featured two types of space efficient volumes: Track space efficient (TSE) volumes Extent space efficient (ESE) volumes Track space efficient (TSE) volumes are used as target volumes of a FlashCopy Space Efficient operation and require the definition of a repository from which tracks are gradually allocated. Extent space efficient (ESE) volumes are the actual thin provisioned volumes that can be used by host applications.The dynamic allocation increments for ESE logical... [More]

I admit, it's not a very appealing title for a blog post. But it's serious matter that pertains to data security and national regulations. The National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) SP 800-131A is a United States standard that defines which cryptographic algorithms are valid and which cryptographic algorithm parameter values are required to achieve a specific security strength in a specific time period. Starting in 2014, a minimum security strength of 112 bits is required when new... [More]

Great news LDAP users, we have updated the IBM DS8870 LDAP authentication Redbooks publication. It is available at : http://www.redbooks.ibm.com/redpieces/abstracts/redp4505.html?Open The Tivoli Integrated Portal previously required, has been replaced by Jazz for Service Management. The book illustrates how to configure LDAP services for the DS8870 with IBM Jazz for Service Managemen t (JazzSM) and Tivoli Storage Productivity Center. LDAP Authentication for the IBM DS8870 The major difference... [More]

Like at the end of 2012 for the first DS8870 release, then again in the second quarter of this year for important Easy tier updates, the European Storage Support Center in Mainz was one more time the host of ITSO Redbooks residencies for the DS8870 Release 7.2. announced 19 November 2013 . As usual, the Redbooks participants came from various parts of the world -- we hosted guests from Brasil, Canada, Indonesia and USA, together with participating authors from Mainz. The team has... [More]